In this process, Jan felt frustrated that she could not do nearly enough, that she was like the little Dutch boy holding a finger in a massive dike—and anything she did was just stopgap, didn’t really solve anything. So much more needed to be done for Mom, and Jan realized her own frustration must be minor compared with Dad’s feelings.
Mom was too weak to cook, so Jan did it all, as Dad had done in recent months. Jan put her mother-in-law to bed, laid an electric blanket over her and set it up, brought her glasses of water and books—all the things Dad had been doing.
Some days they painted together—landscapes of the gardens, the duck pond, the tall, graceful trees around the property, the flowers. Or they went to the beach and took their paints and a picnic lunch along. On large sheets of newsprint, my mother showed Jan how her mother, a professional artist, had taught her to draw large scale without looking at the page, keeping her eyes glued on whatever she was painting.
While Dad was in Alaska, Mom received a dramatic cover art poster from New York for The White Plague, which was soon to be released. It depicted a lush green Irish countryside, a dark, stormy sky and a giant double helix in the foreground. Dad had hoped to see the cover art before he left, but it hadn’t arrived in time. Mom said she was putting it up in a prominent position on the kitchen bulletin board, so Dad would be sure to see it the minute he came in the door.
Mom gave me a phone number so that I could reach my father in Alaska at his fish camp near Lake Creek, which actually was a river. She said it was a radio telephone connection, in which only one person could talk at a time. When one spoke, it cut the line off for the other. Dad told her he was catching a lot of king salmon and rainbow trout and throwing them back, for the sport of it. He quipped that mosquitoes there were so big that four of them marked one fisherman with pheromones (external hormones) and carried him off. They dropped him when they saw a bigger, juicier fisherman. To thwart this danger, Dad claimed he wore a scuba diver’s weight belt while fishing.
On the morning of the July day that Dad was due back from Alaska, Mom said she hadn’t slept well, worrying if everything would be just right for him when he returned. She and Jan were sitting in dark yellow recliner chairs in a reading and television area just off the kitchen, with a table full of books and mail order catalogs between them.
“Could you make Frank a special meal?” Mom asked. “He really likes the barbecued sparerib recipe you gave me.”
Jan went through two big boxes of recipe cards and found one in her own handwriting, from which she made the ribs. As soon as Dad phoned from the airport to say he would be home in a couple of hours, Jan left, so that my parents could share the meal in private.
When Dad arrived, he was so engrossed with having missed Mom that he didn’t notice the giant, bright green poster for The White Plague—it was clearly visible, just inside the entry. Not until hours later, after he had savored the spareribs and was cleaning up in the kitchen, did he see it.
When I think of how my parents felt for one another, about the depth of their love, this incident comes quickly to mind. No matter the glory my father achieved from writing, no matter how many millions of people read his books, it all meant nothing to him without her.
Chapter 33
The White Plague Is Taking Off!
EARLY IN July 1982, my parents announced that they were leaving for a month in Hawaii the following day, a decision they had made on the spur of the moment.
At a hastily arranged dinner in Seattle just before their departure, Dad told us in a sharp, angry voice about the difficulties they were having finding low-salt foods for my mother in restaurants and grocery stores, and how frustrating it was. Salt was everywhere in the American diet, he said, and much of the blame had to do with the ignorance of the medical profession. Doctors knew too little about diet, and not enough meaningful research was being conducted about the benefits and dangers of particular foods and diets.
While Dad was taking care of Mom, Penny was trying to keep Bruce—now thirty-one years old—out of trouble. An incurable disease had recently been discovered that was killing homosexual men—AIDS. From her home in Stockton, California, Penny telephoned Bruce in San Rafael near San Francisco. The most thoughtful and generous person in our family, Penny was always sending us notes and little gifts. Now, with her stepmother seriously ill and weakened, Penny tried to be a mother figure to Bruce, providing him with important advice. She warned him about the dangers in the homosexual community from the new disease and cautioned him against having unprotected sex and relationships with multiple partners. Like the rest of us in the family, she wished he wasn’t homosexual at all. We were all worried about him.
Bruce promised to be careful.
Later that summer after my parents returned, Jan, Julie and I borrowed the Caladan and took it on a week-long sailing trip to the San Juan Islands, along with one of Jan’s brothers, Ron Blanquie, and his wife. It was a great trip, with beautiful weather and excellent winds. When we returned to the Port Townsend Yacht Club, however, I didn’t back the boat in the way Dad wanted it done. Backing confused me, so I took it in bow-first. Dad was on the dock watching, shaking his head in disapproval. After we disembarked he boarded the sailboat and restarted the engine. “Release the lines!” he shouted.
This was done, and he pulled the Caladan out, then turned it around quickly and backed it toward the slip. But he came in at the wrong angle, and too fast. The dock and boat were about to merge when Julie saved the day with quick thinking. At the last possible opportunity the 14-year-old threw a line from the boat around a cleat on the dock and heaved on it as hard as she could.
Subsequently all of us, especially my father, acted as if nothing had happened.
At Xanadu, Mom said her fingernails had been flaking lately, and she was not sure why. I said nothing about it, but worried that it might be an indication of her condition. When she tried to swim the length of the pool, she only made it three-fourths of the way on her own. Dad walked alongside the pool by her as she swam, and dove in quickly to help her finish.
The following Thursday I telephoned to see how she was doing, and she said, “I’m bearing up. Frank took me swimming this morning.”
My mother went on to talk about her jewelry insurance, which I was handling for her. She had a valuable Cortina quartz watch with a gold band, a gift from Dad during one of their European trips, and she told me what amount to use in insuring it. Recently she took the watch to a jeweler and had one of the links in the band taken out so that it would fit better. Her wrist was much smaller from all the weight she had lost.
My mother had bookkeeping ledgers spread before her as she talked, and gave me a couple of tips about looking for errors in the books: how to tell if a figure had been transposed, and if an amount had been moved from debit to credit by mistake.
Sometime that summer my father and mother stopped by our house for a short visit. I recall standing in bright sunlight with him in the backyard. He spoke about the beauty of Kawaloa, and the perfect Hawaiian weather. “There’s a certain kind of warmth you get from the sun that you don’t get anywhere else,” he said.
These words conveyed another message, that the paradise he had provided for Mom in Hawaii had become his as well. It more or less sealed what I already knew and feared, that one day they would finally decide to sell the Port Townsend property and live year-round in Hawaii.
In September, Dad went on a big book tour to promote the hardcover edition of The White Plague. Chauffeured limousines picked up my parents in every city on the tour, and huge crowds greeted Dad at every public appearance.
By the twenty-seventh of the month, the tour was wrapping up and he was scheduled to appear in Seattle. Jan and I met my parents at the Seattle Times at 11:30 A.M., where Dad had just been interviewed by the newspaper’s book editor. A limousine provided by Putnam took us to a posh restaurant in downtown Seattle. I brought along their insurance files, to review at the table.
“The Whit
e Plague is taking off!” Dad said, as he broke open a French roll.
I said I hoped he meant the book, and not the plague germ that would wipe out all womankind on the planet. This elicited a hearty guffaw from him. Dad’s beard was neatly trimmed, shorter than usual, and he was ebullient. He was having the absolute best time of his life, at the height of his success. To crown it, Mom had been strong all through the tour, and said she was feeling good.
The novel had gotten rave reviews from a number of prestigious publications, Dad said, including The New York Times.
It was his sixth national bestseller. Children of Dune, The Dosadi Experiment, God Emperor of Dune and The White Plague had all appeared on weekly bestseller lists. Dune and Dune Messiah were bestsellers as well, from a ground swell that built up over years. Each title in the Dune series sold millions of copies, and the canvas of his imagination kept getting bigger. All Frank Herbert books were selling exceptionally well, with so many reprints of old titles all over the world that it was difficult to keep up with sales figures.
At one of the stores on the tour, a frail old woman in her nineties brought Dad a hardcover first-edition copy of Dune, a collector’s edition. She placed it before him, and leaning close by his ear, whispered in a crackling voice, “Write something dirty in the book for me, please.” Dad’s eyes twinkled as he caught her gaze, and he thought for a moment. Then he wrote, “Something Dirty,” and signed his name.
Another time, Dad actually did write a profanity alongside his signature, in a book he gave to a friend. It had been an impulsive prank, but subsequently he felt guilty for it and sent the friend a substitute copy, more properly autographed.
Occasionally, very rarely, readers would come to Dad with criticisms—some involving major plot points. Dad always smiled pleasantly and said, “Why don’t you go write your own book?”
Despite brisk book sales, my parents were still having trouble keeping up with ongoing construction expenses at Kawaloa. They were drawing up plans for an apartment wing to be built next, and a swimming pool was planned soon after that. A number of the estimates they had received for construction were proving to be woefully low, and they didn’t have a written contract to keep costs down. Even if they’d had a contract, Dad said, it wouldn’t mean much, because of the number of changes he kept making in the design during construction.
In early October, Mom prepared a special birthday meal for Dad—oysters from nearby Quilcene Bay and wild blackberry pie. She said the oysters, as she prepared them, were a favorite of his, and I made notes on how to do it.
After work the following Monday I worked at the public library on a new nonfiction book I was writing about how to deal with dishonest businessmen, which I entitled The Client’s Survival Manual. When I arrived home, Julie said there was an article on her grandfather pinned to a library wall at her high school. It was next to a large paper fish.
Proudly, Julie told a friend, “That’s my Grandpa on the wall there.”
“That fish?” the friend exclaimed.
Margaux, now ten months old, could stand without holding on, but was pretty shaky.
On the eighteenth of October, Mom received good news at her Group Health checkup. Her heart function had improved slightly, undoubtedly from the strict diet and careful exercise regimen she followed. Her potassium level was on the low side, however, so her doctor prescribed Slow-K to keep the level up. To further improve the condition, she was told to eat bananas and drink orange juice daily.
In Seattle that day, however, Mom and Jan rode with an insane taxi cab driver who drove too fast and cornered over the edges of sidewalks, causing pedestrians to jump clear. Another matter unsettled my mother as well, since she was taking her wedding ring to a jeweler that day to have it reduced. Her fingers had become extremely thin from weight loss. It was the first time in thirty-six years she’d had to leave it anywhere.
When we saw Dad that evening, he said that the casting call had gone out on the Dune movie, and that all parts were set with the exception of the three leading roles of Paul Atreides, Lady Jessica and the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam. The base of operations was uncertain, but the desert scenes would be filmed in the Samalayucca Desert in Mexico, since Mexican peso devaluations made it economically attractive.
Dad said that The Lazarus Effect was finished, and that it was a substantial improvement over The Jesus Incident, where he and Bill Ransom had experienced plot and characterization difficulties.
The next morning my parents left for Hawaii, planning to remain until spring. On their second day there, Dad called to say that he had forgotten their passports in Port Townsend, which they needed for a romantic Christmas trip to Samoa and Bora Bora. I promised to retrieve them, along with other items that Mom wanted sent to her. He said he was in tennis shorts looking out at two mountain peaks on the “Big Island” of Hawaii, Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. It was eighty-four degrees, and they were about to leave for dinner at the elegant Hotel Hana Maui.
A month later, by the seventeenth of November, I had typed 170 pages of The Client’s Survival Manual. That evening, Margaux took her first steps—five of them. Her steps were extremely hesitant and uncertain, with no bending of the knees at all. In the manner of a tightrope walker, she had her arms extended at her sides for balance.
Dad called when we were getting ready for bed. It was three hours earlier in Hawaii. He was eighty pages into a new manuscript, Heretics of Dune, fifth in the Dune series. They had decided not to go to Samoa or Bora Bora after all, as he was in the middle of a book and did not want to leave it.
I heard Segovia classical guitar music in the background, from his extensive reel-to-reel collection. Mom came on the line and said she hoped he would change his mind about the South Seas trip. They never did go, and later I learned it was really because of the constant cash flow problems. The trip was on the frivolous side.
Early in December I spoke with Mom by telephone, about Christmas gifts for the children. She said Honolulu was a “two-bit town” for shopping. “It’s not like the places I’ve seen,” she said. “Oh! The places I’ve seen!” The way she said this brought to mind exotic, colorful marketplaces all over the world. It also made me think of an entry in Leto II’s journal in God Emperor of Dune: “Oh, the landscapes I have seen! And the people!”
She was depressed about spending the holidays away from family and said, “Give the girls a big hug for me.”
“I can see your arms stretching across the Pacific to us,” I said.
“Well they are,” she responded.
Four days before Christmas, my father called. He said their Christmas tree was a five-or six-inch-high Hawaiian bush with ornaments on it.
The De Laurentiis people were building sets now, with a $56,000,000 projected film budget, substantially more than earlier estimates. After changing their minds a number of times, the producers had decided to film the entire motion picture in Mexico, because of Mexican peso devaluations. They hoped to release it in the spring or summer of 1984.
I asked Dad how many pesos there were in fifty-six million dollars. His answer: “Muchisimo.” (“Very many.”)
Chapter 34
Her Warrior Spirit
EARLY IN January 1983, I finished The Client’s Survival Manual, nearly five hundred pages, and dispatched it to Clyde Taylor in New York. I had heard my father speak of needing to get a manuscript out the door, getting it finished and out of sight for the sake of sanity, and now I knew what he meant.
I set to work on a new science fiction novel, Sudanna, Sudanna, about an alien planetoid where music was outlawed.
Around this time I spoke with Dad by telephone. He and Mom had just returned from a tiring trip to Carmel and San Francisco. Mom had gone in for medical checkups before and after the trip, and the deterioration of her heart muscle had slowed. This was bittersweet news, since it was still deteriorating.
While in San Francisco, my father wandered into a Market Street bookstore, as a customer. And, as he di
d occasionally, he began removing copies of his books from the racks and signing them. Suddenly the clerk, a huffy young man, rushed over and said, “Now see here! What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m autographing these books, of course,” came the response, in an erudite tone. And Dad pulled another book down from the shelf, a hardcover edition of Children of Dune. On the title page he drew a line through his name and scrawled his signature, with practiced strokes.
“You’ll have to stop, sir!” the clerk exclaimed, believing him to be a pretender, perhaps even a megalomaniac.
“But I’m Frank Herbert.”
The clerk didn’t believe him, not even when Dad held the photograph of himself on the back cover of Children of Dune next his face. It wasn’t until the bearded man produced identification, including a raft of credit cards, that he was finally believed. Then the poor fellow became the most embarrassed, apologetic person on the face of the earth.
Dad told me he was ninety pages into the first draft of Heretics of Dune. He referred to it as “the one all the money’s riding on,” since he was being paid so much for it.
He said Mom and one of the caretakers, Sheila, were planting poinsettias for Jan on the hillside just outside the kitchen window. Poinsettias had been important to my wife since childhood, when she placed them at the base of a statue of the Virgin Mary and prayed for her mother to recover from an illness. Reportedly a miracle had occurred. Over the years, my mother had given Jan poinsettia gifts in a variety of forms, from tablecloths and napkins bearing the design to live plants. Now Beverly Herbert wanted to present her daughter-in-law with fresh flowers when we went to visit. Mom had also been looking for information on cruise ships for me, and had found a couple that she was anxious to tell me about.
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